Connecting Librarian

Was very happy to be able Friday 23rd September’s seminar in Melbourne with David Lee King from Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, fresh from his appearance at NLS #5 in Perth and Hamish Curry from the State Library of Victoria – presented by VALA: Libraries, Technology & the Future Inc. (thanks guys for organising this awesome afternoon’s presentation).

Freak out, geek out or seek out: trends, transformations & change in libraries – David Lee King

New book coming out next year – Face to Face – connecting with users online.

Was at NLS #5, lots of energy and enthusiasm. Saw lots of good ideas there.  Also had lots of staff telling him that they take their ideas back to their libraries and get told NO. Got told a few times that their IT guys are Evil!

Mentioned Grove Library and Community Centre – doing sustainability type things underground. Have movable, comfortable furniture. Don’t have a ref desk, but have staff workstations located around the library as the staff are circulating. They moved shelving and furniture to make room for the community.

Can be a bad place to be freaking out – not good for anybody. Should we be geeking out – as soon as it hits market? No, should be testing out for our users. We need to be seeking out.

Personal technology has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. In libraries, we have online resources, new technologies, new collections and new user expectations, online resources. Gone the way of the past: floppy disks, typewriters, film cameras and watches seem to be on the way out, at least for some.

One big change is we now have competition. Thirty years ago, the only place to get answers or borrow books was the library. Book stores have gotten big and offer many of the same services – they do storytimes, read books, enjoy coffee. Breaks down in the reference question department. If you want something fast – Amazon. They are a big competitor for us.

Not so much competition, but a change that has messed with libraries, is that newspapers are disappearing from print. In US, 120 newspapers have already changed from print to digital. On the Newspaper extinction timeline – it is expected that Australia will no longer have any print newspapers by 2022.

In US, they have rent DVDs from a vending machines on the street. But they don’t have the older titles. Competition for us. E-books, are the same. Overdrive now offers Kindle compatible ebooks now for libraries which maybe helps ease the pressure if we offer it.

Tablets, notebooks and laptops are taking over from desktops. Google has taken over from the ready reference collection. The positive is that it frees us up to answer the deeper questions, that’s if they know to come to us to ask. And then there’s the smart phone – which does everything!  Including making phone calls!

Tech changes in libraries – in the past included fiction, electricity, phone reference, copiers and then in the 1970′s we got our online catalogues and in the 1980′s the PC took off, the 1990′s the internet appears and in 2004 it was Web 2.0. The three biggest destination sights now are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which were created in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Emerging web has changed dramatically and has nothing to do with technology – it is about connecting people. It is real time, decentralised (can visit library on the web, without going to the website), its multimedia (line between newspaper and TV websites are blurring). Every company is a media company – we write articles, create content, pushing out our wares. Emerging web is very mobile – the web is in my pocket – but it should also be that the library is in my pocket. Mobile websites for libraries are a valuable tool – want it to be useful for people who want to do a task quickly – renew, ask a question etc. Emerging web is social, its two way, public with global reach, so need to be careful about what you say – if you can’t say it in person, don’t say it online.

David is Digital Branch Manager, he has a department – IT and a concept – Digital branch. He is a community manager, he scans the horizon, he is executive editor, long range planner, manager, evangelist and he answers the tough questions.

His 3 realities:
1. all services will be physical and digital – not so easy to achieve eg. storytimes
2. we’ll use the web to build unique stuff
3. to some, the digital branch will be their only branch – can place holds and pay to have them mailed out

Content – digital branch has to have things for people to see, do, read etc when they visit. They have catalogue searches on their website as well as their Facebook page. You can subscribe to their blogs by RSS or email. Blogs have photos and info about their blog contributors, so you can focus on the content you enjoy most. Photos they have on Flickr and YouTube are also reposted on their website in their blogs etc.

Community – how do you do community in a digital branch? They have instant messaging reference (using Meebo) and get an answer (if the library is open) – on both their website and embedded in their catalogue. Need to have a front door – that’s dramatic, but every page on the website is a front door, as well as Google, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter are also front doors. We have many digital borders.

Conversation – lots of discussions going on, between staff and users and between users. Conversations on the digital branch include the instant messaging widget, email reference, comments on the blogs (good and bad – which provides opinions and can help you continue the conversation), Facebook comments, Flickr comments, Twitter. Will follow their customers that follow them on Twitter, because they want to focus on their local community. Will celebrate achievements – they sent out a T-shirt to their 1000th follower.

Can have vanity searches for your library, town, postcodes and things like reading etc. Find out what the community is talking about. It gives you an opportunity to step in if you see they’re talking about you, but not talking to you.

Tackle change – ideas to get started thinking about it. A lot of libraries are not seen as relevant in our communities. They go to everyone else, before they come to us and only if they remember. We need to be first. How?
Model the way – you better be doing it first if you expect your staff to be doing it, everyone needs to be on the bus (Jim Collins book – “Good to great” – if you don’t have the right people on the bus, get the wrong ones off and get the right ones on) .

Our websites, our buildings, our services need to be as easy as a light switch to use – so that they don’t have to think about what’s going on – libraries have to stay out of their users way, unless they want to deal with you
Know your patrons – know what they are doing in your buildings, on your PCs, on your website – it can help you with designs and redesigns. It also helps you to know who doesn’t use your library. Find out where your non-users are and then market to them.
Online services have to reflect physical – no “will answer your email within two business days” on your online reference.

If we don’t change, we will die and some libraries in the US are already closing.

As print books slowly disappear and ebooks come to the fore, we will still need libraries, we will still have jobs – our patrons will lead us to where they want us to go.

Finding time – “what do you want me to drop, so that I can do that”. Its not about that, its about changing focus – what is the priority of your library and concentrate on that first, then if there’s time left, you can do other staff. If you can’t, the other stuff will fall to wayside and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Its about the user ultimately and they are online – so we need to be there.

Question: Improvement in catalogue, that negates the need to have instant messaging in catalogue. They are getting a new OPAC, which will meet that. There are overlays, and plugins that can be used to improve catalogue response.

Tablets and roving reference experience. Staff are answering a lot of questions when they are roving around, working well.

New website – can we get immediate content on there. Yes, it is possible, consult with your website provider (small library – Council IT).

Sustainability – what are you doing? Measure use against work input. Have service – personalised reading lists – fill in a form and a librarian will compile a personalised reading list for you, to meet your needs. Wasn’t getting a lot of use, so they re-jigged the form and marketed it and already the response has been good. If it doesn’t improve, they will stop the service.

What is the one next big thing?  Fun – thinks he will be wrong. Google + – just gone public in the last few days. No organisational pages yet, but that will come. Very different to both Twitter and Facebook, so there is definite potential there. Very closely tied to Google Apps, which is potentially a huge change – brings together Facebook, Microsoft and wiki-like content.

His current book: Designing the digital experience.  Website: www.davidleeking.com

Putting IT back in reality – Hamish Curry, Application and Online Learning Manager – State Library of Victoria

Mash-up idea – take photos and put them on top of each, as you rub the them on your  iPhone, you rub down through the years and see the space/place as it was going backwards through time.

Contact: hcurry@slv.vic.gov.au @hamishcurry  slideshare.net/hcurry

Statements heard from people he has spoken to about the SLV: ebooks must be killing libraries, this digital stuff must be making your job hard, guess no-one wants to go the library any more, bet your numbers are down.

Reality – the worst game ever! IT can help augment the experience. Smart phones, tablets are helping to do this. Extend the experience – after this you will look further, online of course. Enhance the engagement – you may tweet your own thoughts and ideas which enhances things.

What breaks assumptions over expectations? How can we get people to come in physically or online, to see for themselves. Seeing is believing, but you have to not only market, but be able to back it up in reality, to participate. They have to also have a social connection, not with the building, but with the people in the building – with people in the library who they believe are more honest and authentic.

Instead, you can offer surprises – offer them something they don’t expect. You need to do things that make your users curious. Give them a chance to discover – so that they end up owning it – even if we miss out on getting the credit. Let them make connections, both to people and to the place.  Learn – check out Happy Planet Index: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ – number five is learning. So very important to ensure people keep learning. All this will keep people coming back.

Do something unexpected and make it cool, both in the physical and online environments. (I geek the library).

Always offer silence, trustworthiness, answers, quality and Wi-Fi. Quality, means finding the balance between doing it right and do it quickly.

From the community section on SLV website – helps embed them back in with their users.

Digital is not so scary – we are still trying to make the worlds information accessible in our pockets – but has moved from a miniature library in a matchbox, to online – the only difference is that we use mobile devices to access it and the content has been outsourced.

Technology has really shaped learning and literacy. We can talk to anyone at any time. We can work together from anywhere at any time. We can connect with people anywhere, any time. The curriculum has had to change too, but teachers are struggling to keep up with these phenomenal changes, so that they can lead young minds. They are getting on board and librarians have to do so too.

Information has changed, but even though trusted sources are always the best, they are not the first two results on a Google search, where people think they are trusted sources. There is so much learning now available on the web, not just content, but ways of providing learning – eg. Video conferencing. Information scarcity has changed to information complexity. Clay Shirky – “Its not information overload. Its filter failure.” This is what librarians are great at and we need to be able teach everyone.

Khan Academy – www.khanacademy.org – 2500 videos to teach you just about everything. Some good, some bad.

We are answer rich, but question poor. (Susan Greenfield – “Quest for identity in the 21st century.”) Hamish has great admiration for reference librarians who deal with people who have done the search but cant navigate what they found, or find the answer they seek.

University of Sydney has created a great range of engaging resources to help people to search and filter. SLV has done the same with ERGO (http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/). Designed for students, but stats showing that teachers are finding it very valuable.

Hoddle Waddle (http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/explore/student-teacher-resources/hoddle-waddle-education-kit) – program to help students navigate 50 sites in the CBD in a day. Not taken up initially, but once they made most of the content Freemium, bookings have improved and all the resources are being much better used. Teachers are now presenting on the program at conferences. They are now considering offering it as a public program, for cultural visitors to use it. Improvements in progress including mobile contributions using Broadcastr. ARIS is another app which does something similar. As augmented reality becomes more mainstream, there will be even more opportunities to put IT back into reality.

Change involving technology, needs not only the tech, but also a cultural change.

Interaction with inanimate. SLV playing with QR codes – used it in a gallery to see how people
use it. There are also Google Goggles, i-nigma, Red Laser, Photosynth – a 360 degree mapping app.

Risk: Partners and programs – risk is not a dirty word, being risk adverse – makes you slow and inflexible – wont do anything because we could get it wrong, it requires trust of the organisation in their staff, motivation, relationship – always remembering that shift will happen.

If you don’t step in and do it, someone else will – and they not present what you think should be.

Some tools to do this: RSS, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, Yammer. Half of SLV is now on Yammer, after starting with 5 a year ago.

Networks are always changing – online mimics what nature does – new networks develop and old ones die and drop away.

“Use the force, Luke”. – Obi Wan Kenobi. We need to harness the world around us. We want to be able to pull people on site and push them online. Don’t create your own social space, go to where your users are already. Need to occupy multiple spaces to access different audiences.

Sometimes you need to prepackage content and bring it to the fore, to make it easier for people to access and to bring our collections alive.

“The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance.” (Peter Senge – “Fifth discipline”) SLV programs: TedX Melbourne and now happening around the world, but it pulls people in and engaging with you, Personal Learning Network with SLAV teaching teachers and teacher librarians about the online world.

Its not so much I Communication T, but change as the C in ICT. We need libraries to be FUN – not just the physical, but the online as well. Need to know what the drivers are, have to be prepared to play and technology has a role. (Night at the Mitchell Library video).

Video games are changing how things work. They have play, replay and experimentation, they involve risk and reward, they can be integrated experiences and augmented experiences. The only difference between chess and video games is a shift in format – the skills and experience are very similar.

International initiatives – Find the Library at NYPL, National Gaming Day in US Libraries, Freeplay at SLV.

Merge and mirror programs – a fusion between what they experience in one space and are further enhanced in another. Transmedia – can stand alone (eg. Facebook), but can also be linked to draw people to other spaces. Hacks and Library Apps can also be used to enhance experiences.

Data is becoming sexy as people are presenting it differently. eg. Infographics, Library Hack, Open Government Data.
“But problem solving , however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results. ” (Peter Drucker – “The Effective Executive”)

“When people in motion, meet a library in motion, anything is possible” – Director Stockholm Public Library.

We had a great time in Papua New Guinea and its something that we saw there that gave inspiration to this post.

We visited the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) mission base in Ukarumpa in the PNG Highlands. It is the largest mission base in the world and supports the translation and literacy work in Papua New Guinea (with 869 languages), the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. It is home to around 1000 people, so as expected, it has its own primary and secondary schools.

With the schools comes the school libraries, as well as a separate research library for the work SIL does and a public library for personal and recreational needs. We visited the primary school and research libraries and one thing of obvious note was that they were running on different LMS’s.

Both my husband and I immediately thought about the wasted opportunity this was.

My public library is in an LMS consortia and our borrowers enjoy the benefits of having access to the collections of 15 public libraries, through one catalogue search.  At Ukarumpa, they have a small geographic area in a controlled environment – ideal for enabling cross borrowing between the libraries, but that facility is not available.

Who would such a thing be good for? Initially I thought mainly for the secondary school students, who may have research to do on the work of SIL or on more specialist topics relating to Papua New Guinea (the research library’s survey maps were wonderful).  But then I started realising that it could go much broader than that. The public library is not large, so a base resident looking for a book from their childhood to read to their children, might find it at the primary school library. Someone wanting to satisfy their curiosity as to the history of a particular time period may find it at the secondary school library. Someone studying literature might find related works at the public library.

How could this translate into our environment?  As I said, my public library already has access to both our consortial library catalogues and then broader to the greater Victorian public library network with Library Link Victoria. But what about other libraries and what they can access?

I know the National Library of Australia has a vision for all libraries to have their catalogue holdings live on Libraries Australia and I love that vision, but it could be overwhelming for the borrower wanting to find something in their local area.

So what am I suggesting? I keep thinking that my kids at school could find it useful to be searching their school catalogue and at the same time, if required, be able to see the holdings of their local public library too. I would like to see our public library catalogue able to search the local university for anything that our library doesn’t hold. I’d like to think that all the different sorts of libraries could overcome their differences and restrictions, in a way that is still fair to their primary users of course, to make their materials available to whoever wants it.

Pipe dream or not?  Love to hear what you think.

Karen Calhoun – OCLC – The emergent library: new lands, new eyes

Proust – “The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”

Talking about connections, content and conversations between institutions. Help each other so that in turn we can do the share the same with our end users.

Breakthroughs come about when conventional wisdom and established beliefs are set aside. eg. Copernicus. (earth is round – saw with new eyes)

World has moved on to cloud computing which has empowered connections and conversations in an entirely new way.

Newspapers and other mainstream media are being majorly disrupted by the availability of this content on the internet.

Disintermediation of libraries is running in parallel to media. 2005 OCLC study showed that students began their information searches at search engines as opposed to library websites/catalogues (89% vs 2%).

Brace for change, embrace change.  Darwin – “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

We need plan B, need to adapt to the new conditions facing us. Issues are too big to be solved by libraries working alone. Cooperation on a scale not previously realised, will be required – eg. OCLC, Libraries Australia, NASL.

If we were starting over, what would we be doing?

Embed collections in the web – collections are becoming more universally available and less institutionally focused. Do we know any more what the collection is? (Ross Atkinson – Janus) Karen Calhoun 2006 report to Library of Congress, recommended leadership, expansion, extension. Putting collections out where their users are.  Long term vision: local catalogue linked to a chain of services, infrastructure to support multi level global access, aggregation of content, many starting points and integrate collections and learning spaces. Check out the Discoverability report from University of Minnesota Libraries in 2009. National Library NZ has synchronised and syndicated their images through Flickr Commons, their catalogue, World Cat and other partners. Pushing metadata out, pulling users in.

Cooperating to enable discovery and delivery – of more than just traditional content provided by libraries. Now includes digitised rare content, primary source materials, images, communications, research data, learning objects and more. Problem – these can’t be collected in the traditional sense. Digital collections have been shown to attract a new, interested group of users. Studies show that digital collections are attracting more traffic.  Library of Congress has nearly 3 times more visits to their American Memory site in contrast to their catalogue and legislative information. Open repositories are also gaining in visibility and impact.

Cooperating to understand and engage with local communities – we do not have to choose between local, group and global communities. We are still place, but not restricted to our geographic location. Books continue as the mainstay in US public libraries (study 2004 to 2008), but they are spending a lot more on media and about the same on magazines and electronic resources.  Check out the re-imagining libraries project from NASL. Is there a ways for libraries to collaborate – make their spaces more useful for their users? eg. Information commons, collaboration spaces. ARL Statistics showing that both circulation stats and number of reference enquiries are on a downward slide. There is a marked drop in use of printed materials in libraries.

Cooperating to realise a culture of continuous improvement – can’t do your best, have to know what to do and then do your best. You may be doing great work, but is it the right work. (W. Edward Dennings quote).

Cooperative systems at the crossroads – need to find new levels of library cooperation.

What if?
Libraries could more readily share the effort and costs of collection management – collection analysis, new collection development off-site storage, preservation, e-resources, networked knowledge bases?
What if we could manage collections in the cloud?
What if we could cooperate to move from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries? Eg, OCLC Digital Collections Gateway- a web based self-service tool.
What if we could collectively take better advantage of meta-data already produced and meta-data we could get from other places? Check out World Cat Identities and VIAF.

Have a big week coming up – attending and giving a short showcase at VALA in Melbourne. So before I start blogging that (hopefully live), I thought give my readers some interesting things to read.

Pew/Internet regularly produces reports related to online use. One of the latest was conducted with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois on Information searches that solve problems: how people use the internet, libraries and government agencies when they need help.  Interesting results include high use of public libraries by Generation Y’ers for the scenarios surveyed, digital divide is still an issue and the expected result of the internet as a first stop.  Well worth a look at.

University College London has produced another in their series of Ciber briefing  papers, this one on the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future.   The study was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to “identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time.”  Very eye opening with some interesting results.

The Horizon Report 2008 from the New Media Consortium is out.  It aims to “identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning or creative expression within learning-focused organizations’.  This is their 5th annual report.  Considering the link between libraries of any type and our learning organisations, this is a key document to be watching.  The key emerging technologies highlighted in this report include grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence and social operating systems.   You can get the gist of the report through the Executive Summary.  Definitely food for thought for our libraries.

Enjoy!

An amazing service is provided from the lower area of ImaginOn. Storytimes to go (STG) provides pre-literacy kits for preschool teachers and carers. The kits are themed and aimed at getting children interested in reading. The kits have 8 to 12 picture books, a booklet of original activities written by the staff (of 4), flannelboard activities, recordings of activity songs, a puppet or educational toy and a family activity sheet. They also have art kits, adversity kits which explain cultural diversity, meet the author kids (including one on Mem Fox) and bilingual (English/Spanish kits). They have over 560 kits on over 100 themes.

The way it works: a teacher from the local county contacts them. They must first attend an orientation workshop where they learn the rules, about the kits and how to use them and how to care for the materials. Once they have completed orientation, they get the list of themes. The teacher calls and asks for a kit, STG sends the kit to their nearest PLCMC kit to collect. They have it for 4 weeks and all loans are managed from the STG office. There no overdues on the kits and late kits are returned after a follow up phone call. STG also offers workshops on storytelling and other skills.

They have now expanded their services to their website. Between 1000 and 2000 free activities are available online over 50 themes, with more being added which will eventually number between 150 and 200 themes. This is all the supporting material that is available within the kits. Teacher resources are also available.

I spent the afternoon talking with Chuck Rigney – Web Services Manager about PLCMC’s internet presence. If you haven’t checked out the PLCMC websites, you really should and allow some time to do so, as they have so much content online. They have 16 websites with their own domain names plus their intranet. Initially they got the domain names because they didn’t want people to know it was the library providing the content. They are considering leveraging the content back to the PLCMC website, but may keep the domain names.

Web Services comprises Chuck, with 2 developers and a graphic designer based in their Main Library. They have 5 active web teams who provide the content for their website, each with a different focus and comprising 6 to 8 people. They focus on book reviews, childrens, adults etc and meet monthly with someone from Web Services attending every meeting. Unlike other teams at PLCMC, these are not arbitrarily rotated – librarians move on when they want a change. When this happens, their position is internally advertised and potential members can be interviewed.

They use Active server pages and built the interface themselves, making it flexible and adaptable. It may take longer than off the shelf packages, but they get exactly what they want. The IT department maintains all their servers in-house, for the website they have 2 production servers and a development server. A recent access issue resulted in content being split between the 2 servers and a clean-up of superseded files which resolved the issue. Apart from the PLCMC website, the others use templates to call on the content from the database as required.

Some content has been developed off-site as it came for a grant – including the Smart Collection and Hands on Craft. StoryPlace is by far their biggest website, so now has its own T1 line to manage the traffic. They have considered hosting it out due to the bandwith requirements.

Looking at new options, such as creating content in a blog and then pulling content from the RSS feed into a HTML webpage.

Their Intranet was developed in-house and is 6 years old. They will be updating the look and functionality soon, getting complaints about not being able to find things. At present Chuck is the only one updating the intranet, they want to share the content management and are considering replacing it with a wiki.

They use a system-wide calendar, with the branches entering all their own data. Proprietary software then pulls this content from this and into the website. On their intranet they have a link on each page, “Does this need an update” and the equivalent on their webpages “Comment on this page” which is on the same level as the breadcrumbs, which enables their users to easily let them know of any problems on a Intranet or webpage.

Their latest website design, which was launched last year, was user tested. They took the 2 prototypes of the website which they designed in-house and a consultant user tested it with focus groups. The feedback included: patrons interested in their local branch, not the wider service, wanted to see people, not buildings. As a result, users can set their local branch and its info as their homepage, but as a result they can miss out on regional happenings as it appears further down the page. They have over 1600 individual webpages, although some were created for one off events and have yet to be removed from their servers. The main PLCMC is the biggest in terms of pages and management as the others use dynamically driven content.

They used to host external websites, but it became too expensive for them to do so. They may consider doing it again if it was revenue generating.

Chuck ensures that he and his team have time to play, learn and find out what’s out there on a daily basis. Its the best way to ensure that they stay current and are using the best means and options for their websites. They are looking to use more of the Library 2.0 tools to add more functionality to their website, particularly patron content, including patron comments on their catalogue (Sirsi-Dynix’s Horizon ILS).

Will blog some post conference thoughts on Computers in Libraries 2007 soon. In the meantime, here’s my notes from my first day at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (PLCMC). PLCMC is a regional service, with 24 branches, the main library being in downtown Charlotte.

Helen welcomed me to their main library and Branch Manager Susan Herzog took me on the tour. Lots of photos, so check them out on my Flickr account. I loved their columns out front, where each of the four sides has a book or library related quote – check out their list of quotes. I will only describe the buidling briefly here, the pictures tell a better story, so check them at Flickr. The building is over 4 levels, the ground floor level is circulation, the popular library, gallery and music and movies. The second level is reference and non-fiction, the third is the admin area and Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room which is their local history collection. In the basement area is the Virtual Village, their funky tech area. The library was first built in 1903, demolished the rebuilt on site in the 1950′s, then extended in 1989. They are now looking at their options for the future development of the library.

Helen then took me to ImaginOn which is 2 blocks away. (check the Flickr account). Lois Kilkka the manager, took me on a fascinating tour of this amazing facility. It is a purpose built shared building which houses the children’s and teens area of the library as well as their partner the Charlotte Children’s Theater. It is a green building, which uses a lot of recycled materials, including feature walls built of recycled headstones and the toilet walls made of recycled detergent bottles – fascinating! There are 2 theatres in the building – one seating 270+, the other 560+, which are used for children’s programs as well as the theatre performances.
They have experienced a lot of challenges with their shared facility, including the need for shared staff in the theatre spaces.

Their story lab, which contains the Story jar is a place to inspire creativity and collaboration. Using the items hanging from the jar, they encourage children to create stories. They also have individual computers to do the same and group collaboration is possible on their “create a scene” with each child contributing costumes, music, characters and more to a production which they then perform. After they complete their story or scene, the children can scan their library card and their creation is published to the web.

They also have dedicated literacy PCs in the children’s area, but also had to install the same software in their tech area upstairs, as the demand for group visits far exceeded their expectations and needed to be accommodated. Lois explained that they needed to adapt their thinking about the facility and look at it a bit more like a children’s museum than a traditional children’s library – it is a real destination for groups of children of all ages.

They had to create a parents space and added activities for preschoolers to better accommodate families. The parents space has magazines, a paperback exchange and the whole facility has wireless internet access throughout.

The teen tech area upstairs includes 4 rooms which are used for theatre camp, school activities and are occasionally hired out. This space has 30PCs and 5 Macs for use. They have a 15 PC training lab and have run programs like MySpace for parents here.

The Loft is the teen library, with the teen library collection as well as drop in activities such as crafts/games and affinity group programming (ie. Anime group etc). The only rules here are respect yourself, respect others and respect the facility. They have Blockbuster events quarterly where they open up to the public after hours. The PCs in this area have Photoshop and productivity software for film post production. They also have 11 laptops for use in this area and there is plenty of seating available.

The jewel in this crown is iStudio, where teens can create animation, music and more. They have 2, 2-dimensional animation stations, a 3-dimensional animation and a live action station as well as music creation equipment which has been wildly popular. They have library staff and high school interns to assist students with their works, with some of them available on YouTube. Check out Troy Story which was created at ImaginOn and won a national award.

ImaginOn also holds the offices for the Children’s Theater, including costumes, set design and 2 large rehearsal rooms. The facility has a vibe as a result, because there is always creation going on somewhere in the building.

Kelly then took me on a tour of Teen Second Life which PLCMC manages in partnership with the Alliance Library System and is only accessible to teens and background checked adults. We went to the robotics labs, were a teacher meets with teens to create robotic examples, at present they have a machine making cookies! There is a Teen Art Gallery where they display works created in real life. A radio station plays resident created content (a Linden Labs initiative) so you can stream music into Second Life. It has a park which has a memorial for Virginia Tech, which was created by a teen and has the facility for leaving messages. The area is still under development and includes teaching space, performance space, meeting space and a coffee shop!

The animation studio is used by girl scout and boy scout groups as well as teens in general, who come in to learn about the processes involved, as well as creating content. They have recently added a Mac with Garage Band (music creation software), with a midi keyboard coming. Another Mac is coming with more editing software.

Will blog more about my day later. I will finish with a summary – WOW! This facility is amazing and really reaches to teens and kids – it is all about creation and collaboration and I would love to have something like this in my city.